A Stolen Childhood (7 page)

I stepped in while she paused to gather breath.

‘Well, that’s all really useful information,’ I said quickly. ‘Perhaps it’s the changes that have led to her feeling a little strung out.’ Not to mention the obvious bad feeling between her parents, I thought, but didn’t say. It was
so
obvious, too – kids were always badly affected by warring parents – but to say so to this woman I’d not yet even met would be to cross a line I didn’t feel I should cross at this stage. I didn’t have all the facts, after all.

But I was quite keen to add to the ones I already had. ‘Which was why I thought it might be helpful,’ I added, ‘if I could chat to you together at some point as well.’

‘What, drag me up to the school?’ Mrs Bentley seemed affronted at the very thought.

‘No, no – at home,’ I explained. ‘We tend to like to do that wherever possible. Feels less formal that way – all the better to help the child open up.’

All the better to get a different perspective on the relationship between child and carer as well. You could learn so much more when you saw a child on home turf.

‘When would this be?’ she wanted to know. ‘I told you. I work long hours.’

‘When it works best for
you
,’ I reassured her. ‘Whenever you feel you can fit it in. After school one day perhaps? Just for an hour or so. No more than that. How about I give you Gary Clark’s number and you get in touch and let him know when will suit you best. You remember him, don’t you?’

Mrs Bentley said she did, and promised she would call him when she could, and as I ended the call I pondered the reality of their domestic situation: the daily grind of working long hours, for meagre pay, in order to bring in sufficient money to keep a roof over her and her daughter’s head. It
was
hard; for some families, it was nigh on impossible. She was right. This was the real world, not fairy land.

The poor kid, I thought, as I began preparing trays for my new charges. Stuck in the middle of adversarial parents and their rows wasn’t a nice place to be. Nor was having to be up all hours and living a peripatetic life, without proper bedtimes, much less a mum there to kiss you goodnight and to wish you sweet dreams. It was no wonder she was tired and on edge.

It would certainly explain why she was coming to school tired, and why she’d developed the self-soothing habit of pulling out her hair. It would possibly also explain why she kept herself to herself. Yes, I thought, making a mental note to write up my conversation with Mrs Bentley, I probably had my answer right there.

Well, possibly.

Chapter 5

There was a knock on my classroom door a few minutes before the bell went, which I answered to find a trio of children standing outside. The first I recognised immediately as Thomas, the lad who’d had the head injury the previous morning. His hair was longer than I’d realised. Almost past his shoulders, it looked like it was crying out for a good brush, and though his uniform had clearly seen better days, it certainly hadn’t seen a washing machine in a while. Neither, I judged – hazarding a guess – had the tattered but expensive-looking trainers that were on his feet but not the uniform list. Given what I knew of him already, it all figured. As did the faint musty, slightly sweet smell that had arrived in the room with him.

The boy at Thomas’s side was his polar opposite. Jonathan was slight and be-freckled, with neatly cut blond hair, and was turned out precisely as I’d anticipated he would be, given he was currently living with a foster family. He was bright as a pin, stiff with new clothes and grooming; only the slight edge of wariness in his expression hinted at the complicated background that I knew lay beneath.

The third child – presumably Chloe – was a beautiful girl. She was somewhat dishevelled, too, a bit like a Disney Cinderella – though presumably not as a result of being on the run around Britain, but simply as a consequence of just being Chloe. Her smile was wide and genuine but her vulnerability was writ large – I wondered how many challenges she had to face just to get productively through the day.

Chloe’s hair was long and unruly like Thomas’s, though in her case the unruliness took a different form. It was almost white-blonde and stuck out in all sorts of different directions, putting me in mind of candyfloss – the kind given to you on a stick at a fair. On balance, ‘unruly’ was probably too mild a word for it. I found myself drawn to her immediately.

She was the first to speak. ‘Good morning, Miss Watson,’ she trilled, directing her high-wattage beam at me, then, without waiting for a reply, gripping both boys by the elbows and more or less manhandling them inside, much to their evident surprise. ‘I’m Chloe Jones,’ she added. ‘I’m the eldest out of all of us. And Miss Vickers has sent us all to do our work with you.’

I closed the door behind them. ‘Welcome, all of you. It’s very nice to meet you. And first of all, Thomas …’ I noticed him stiffen as I said his name. ‘Are you sure you’re well enough to be in school? That was a nasty bang you had yesterday, even if it didn’t need stitches. I was surprised when Mrs Styles told me you’d come in this morning.’

Thomas jerked himself free of Chloe’s vice-like grip. ‘It’s alright, miss,’ he said, sweeping a hand up behind his hair, then flipping it up and turning around so I could see the war wound for myself; well, at least a neat square of shaved head around a rectangular dressing. ‘I just gotta make sure I don’t get it wet.’

‘And you’re feeling okay?’ I asked him.

‘I’m feeling fine,’ he said, puffing his chest out almost imperceptibly, in what seemed an automatic, almost unconscious gesture, as if to face off anyone who might hint at weakness. I wondered how far his family had come and how he felt about his step-dad.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘you make sure you let me know if you feel funny in any way, won’t you? Any way at all, Thomas. Tired or dizzy, headache – anything at all.’

‘I’m fine, miss,’ he said again. ‘It weren’t nothing much.’

Well, that was going to be debatable, once Kiara made an appearance, at any rate. In the meantime, I was still conscious that Chloe hadn’t put Jonathan down yet. ‘Chloe, love,’ I said to her, ‘why don’t you come with me. Since you’re the eldest, you can be the first one to choose a tray to keep your things in.’

I held out a hand and she released Jonathan, reaching readily for it instead, reminding me that her touchy-feely nature extended to all human life, including teachers. ‘Can I, miss?’ she said, as I led her to the cabinet I kept the trays in – the ones where students kept their work and personal belongings, such as pencil cases and whichever card collections were currently the in thing. ‘Here we are,’ I said. ‘Look, there are the pens – can you take them to the table? And the trays have the name tags already inside them, so if you’d like to choose which one you want, then you can go ahead and sit down and write yours, okay?’

This seemed occupation enough for the moment, so I left Chloe to decide on a colour, and turned my attention back to the two boys. I’d yet to have very much to go on with Jonathan; it would mostly be a case of watch and wait with him over the coming days, to try and tease out why his behaviour was on such a marked downward trajectory.

In that respect, Thomas seemed the more straightforward of the two. I decided that he put me in mind of a modern-day Artful Dodger, and not just because of his hair – which badly needed cutting – and his dodgy antics with Kiara the previous day. There was a veneer of confidence about him, a kind of swagger – though so far, at least, not an irritating one; just this aura he had of being able to handle himself. Which would figure, given his circumstances, and the fact that he was markedly big for a 12-year-old, and I knew that his cockney accent – which, again, was Artful Dodger through and through – would confer status on him all by itself.

He didn’t yet know that Kiara would be joining us, however, and as I knew she could walk through the door at any moment, I was keen to prepare the ground first.

‘Right, boys,’ I said, ‘let’s get some trays done for you as well, eh? Chloe’s just getting the pens out, and we’ll sit you all over there.’ I pointed to the table I’d indicated to Chloe and where she was now settling down at to colour her name in. ‘I thought as there’s only going to be four of you, you can all sit together. To start with, in any case – we’ll have to see how it works out, won’t we?’

At which moment, as if spirited there specifically to underline the point, there was a second knock at the door and it opened to admit Kelly and Kiara.

‘Speak of the devil!’ I quipped, as I watched Kiara’s jaw drop.

‘What’s
he
doing here?’ she asked me immediately.

‘The same as you are, love,’ I said mildly, nodding a greeting to Kelly. ‘Just one of life’s funny little coincidences. Thomas here is going to be with us for half of the week, and …’

‘But I only just got away from him, miss!’

Thomas, for all his confidence, said nothing in response to this. Just looked from me to Kiara and back again, clearly bemused. I could almost see his brain whirring, trying to decide what this unexpected development might mean. Which pleased me greatly, as it hinted that, once separated from a peer group that needed impressing, he’d be much less of a class clown than his previous behaviour had suggested. He was probably also more than a little wary.

‘You’d be with Thomas anyway, Kiara,’ I pointed out, sensing that she already knew she had the upper hand. ‘You’re in the same tutor group, aren’t you? The only difference is that here you’ll be spending a bit more of the day together, which will mean you can put yesterday behind you
all the quicker
, won’t it?’

‘Excellent point,’ Kelly enthused, returning my cheery grin. ‘So, well, I’ll leave you to it, then, Mrs Watson. And what do you say to Mrs Watson, Kiara?’ she prompted before she left.

‘I’m sorry I’m late, miss,’ Kiara parroted as she shrugged off her rucksack, looking thoroughly miserable, resigned to her lot.

‘Right, Kiara,’ I said, keen to focus on my group bonding session, ‘you’ve already got your tray labelled so why don’t you pop your things in it, then go and take a seat by Chloe over there?’ I made the requisite introductions and, once the children were settled round the table, albeit warily, in Thomas and Kiara’s case, set about getting the lesson under way. The plan for today was for the group to start getting to know each other, and, hopefully, for the children to begin to form bonds by doing activities that involved them working together.

This wasn’t just about creating a sense of family in class either – it was also so that I could start assessing the group dynamic and begin to understand the pecking order that was going to emerge. It always did: in any group (whether in school or the workplace, it was the same) everyone always played their part. There would always be an apparent leader – sometimes two – emerging early, plus that class clown who got their status by making others laugh, and the ones who were more happy being led than leading, be it willingly or slightly resentfully. And at some point, more often than not, a
real
leader would emerge. One who wasn’t necessarily vocal about being ‘the boss’, but who would quietly assess the others and work out how best to manipulate the group to get the best out of them, even if that meant allowing someone else to believe they were the one in charge.

It was an important exercise, generally played out over a couple of weeks, and as I loved group dynamics I found it fascinating. Though, right now, with my relatively small (and, in Chloe’s case, relatively transparent) bunch of charges, I’d probably have an inkling by the end of the day. One thing was already clear: Thomas was getting first run at stating his case, quietly filling Jonathan in on his run-in with Kiara the previous day, while Kiara herself, seemingly happy to rely on a non-speaking strategy, was being comprehensively adopted by Chloe, who seemed intent on plaiting sections of her hair.

‘Okay,’ I said, clapping my hands together to get their attention, ‘first up are the interviews I’m going to be doing with you all. Once we’ve got the morning’s activity under way I’m going to be calling you individually to the quiet area, so we can have a chat and I can get to know you a little better. In the meantime, here’s what we’re doing first.’

I then explained what the morning’s activity would comprise: an exercise designed to break the ice and work on their listening and general communication skills. It was an area where lots of kids who came to me struggled, often because they had so much already on their minds that they would ‘zone out’ of whatever it was they were supposed to be doing. The task was therefore all about listening to one another; telling each other little anecdotes about things that had happened to them, which the listener would transcribe and make the basis for a story of their own. I also explained that I wanted them to illustrate their stories too – both with a picture of their partner, and one of themselves – you could tell so much from how a kid perceived themselves via the medium of drawing.

‘A self-portrait,’ I clarified. ‘Who knows what a self-portrait is?’

Thomas shot his arm up enthusiastically, which was gratifying. ‘Miss, I know that one, miss. It’s a picture you do of yourself, ain’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, tickled once again by his accent. I pointed to the back wall. ‘And once they’re done they can all go up there.’

‘Like mugshots on
Crimewatch
,’ he suggested.

‘Exactly,’ I agreed, noticing Kiara’s expression.
Exactly
, I could see her eyes saying.

I called Jonathan for his life-space interview first and he followed me across to the reading area with what looked like genuine enthusiasm. This was good to see and, given the information in his file, unexpected. I’d been expecting an adversarial, antagonistic child.

‘I’m 11,’ he announced proudly as he sat on one of the big cushions, ‘and I live with my foster mummy and daddy.’

Jonathan’s file suggested that he operated below average intellectually and, emotionally, had the social age of around seven or eight. And I could immediately tell that this was true. It meant I’d need to ignore his real age as I spoke with him, rather as I would have to do with Chloe.